Scrawlspace
Emily Alesandrini & Lucia Olubunmi R. Momoh
“I have made a mark, and I do not know whether I am drawing or writing. I am thinking about marks and how they collect on a surface. I have accumulated marks, and I believe that this accumulation is at once a drawing, a text, and an archive. I am thinking, as I am so often thinking, about the proximity of writing to drawing. I am also thinking about how archives are always already oriented toward the future. What is the archive but that which awaits activation?”
- Steffani Jemison [1]
When does writing become drawing become writing? While words hold evolving definitions, interpretations, and subtexts, they are also marks of aesthetic, color, and texture. Many Black people in the United States employ mark making via textiles, drawings, print, and painting to allude to complex and clandestine realities—what Toni Morrison referred to as the “unspeakable thoughts, unspoken.”[2] Such histories complicate the ability to “read” this entanglement of meaning and, in so doing, expand the function of text. Decoupled from legibility or definition, how might this writing be read? And how might we write back?
The exhibition Scrawlspace spotlights a group of artists who visually re/work, re/imagine, and de/construct text, exploring the in/ability of language and writing to fully encapsulate Black experiences. Alongside many others, the artists in the show—Sadie Barnette, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Sonya Clark, Tony Cokes, Renee Gladman, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Steffani Jemison, Glenn Ligon, Adam Pendleton, Jamilah Sabur, Gary Simmons, and Shinique Smith—examine the historically-charged relationships Black Americans have maintained with writing, reading, and language, revealing new possibilities for and beyond words. Some render letters illegible, glyphic, or coded—creating images from alphabets and graphic gestures that speak to opacity, complexity, and a multiplicity of meanings beyond sanctioned readings and definitions. By annotating and obscuring texts and documents, artists visualize interventions into difficult histories—from literacy laws to state surveillance to the unknowable silences within the archive. Yet, artists also demonstrate how writing back or against language through poetry and mark-making can constitute acts of refusal, sabotage, and liberation—serving as instruments in community and world-building. In spite of, and from inside the constraints of the oppressive systems colonial idioms uphold, Black artists have located room for resistance in writing—scrawlspaces, through which liberation can be felt and fostered.
In his 2017 text, Black and Blur, Fred Moten describes “scrawlspace” as the “cramped and capacious” scene of writing from where “fantasy and document, music and moaning, movement and picturing converge.”[3] Moten credited the term to Hortense Spillers but was not able to locate “scrawlspace” in any of Spillers’ published writings. Instead, he cited poet and scholar Harryette Mullen’s 1992 essay, “Runaway Tongues.”[4] Mullen appears to have been the first to credit “scrawl space” to Spillers in her text on demonstrations of Black women’s “resistant orality” in written narratives of slavery. Mullen argues that the Black feminine body “preserve[d] an oral record of atrocities endured in slavery” which, as women increasingly claimed access to literacy, they translated into writing. In “Runaway Tongues,” she discusses freedom-seeker Harriet Jacobs’ 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, emphasizing that the latter “implicitly regards her own narrative voice as the continuation of other voices,” and that, “literacy serves to record for a reading audience a continuity of experience already constructed and preserved within her family through oral accounts.”[5] Incidents reveals how the formerly enslaved mother spent seven years in her grandmother’s crawlspace, a site she called her “loophole of retreat,” plotting her route to freedom, watching over her daughter and son, and evading the predatory advances of her enslaver. Mullen recalls Spillers labeling this “loophole” and Jacobs’ written description of it as a “scrawl space”: the “cramped, hidden spaces in which black women’s self-expression moved toward literary production.”[6]
Mullen cited “scrawl space” to Spillers’ iconic essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: an american grammar book,” in which the Black feminist scholar lays out how, given the confines on definitions of femininity in former-slave societies like the United States, Black women were first precluded from being defined as “women” and then punished for this “failure.” However, while Spillers’ essay constitutes a writing back and against oppressive language systems, she employs neither “scrawl space” nor “scrawlspace” in the text. When we reached out to Moten and Mullen, they both disclosed that they could not locate the term in Spillers’ published works and, looking back, Mullen could not recall when or where she first encountered it. Spillers herself revealed that she has no recollection of inventing “scrawlspace/scrawl space.” This left all of us wondering, did the term surface in private conversation? Was it explored in some unrecorded talk? Or in a casual Q&A response?
While its exact origin remains unknown, given the long history of the appropriation, manipulation, and theft of Black women and queer folx’s labor and language, Moten and Mullen’s insistence on citing Spillers demonstrates a shared admiration for and attachment to the concept, amplifying its enchantment and use. The phrase’s reappearance in and movement through various texts demonstrates the fugitive and caring qualities of Black American writing and research traditions. Scrawlspace / scrawl space speaks to the collective nature of the creation process, of giving meaning to words. As Kameelah Janan Rasheed reminds us, “[a] text itself is never finished,” but is rather, an invitation to edit and talk back.[7]
Adopting Scrawlspace as a project title situates citation as Black liberation praxis while emphasizing the influence of writings by scholars like Moten, Mullen, and Spillers on contemporary artists and art historians. Citation can be rooted in notions of kinship and community. This is visualized in the murals, posters, and banners of Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, an artist who weaves disparate words of dissent borrowed from demonstrations and protests into cacophonous, colorful paintings and prints that connect revolutionary movements and radical communities across time and space. Whereas in the work of Tony Cokes and Glenn Ligon, citation often constitutes a talking back to canons of literature and art, to structures and hierarchies of alleged prestige.
Many of the artists in the exhibition—including Renee Gladman, Steffani Jemison, and Kameelah Janan Rasheed—maintain writing practices. Gladman, a novelist who turned to drawing to enhance her writing, refers to herself as a “writer of drawings,” a label which, “attest[s] to the questions that inspired this dual practice in the first place.” These queries include:
“[H]ow I can go on writing without writing? How can I experience language as a nervous system? See it move, expand, react as energy, as an intelligence? How can I look mechanically at the way narrative builds and moves and decomposes? How can I talk about the wave lines and marks, both intentional and accidental? Make portals in the world? Create bridges to unknowns and elsewheres?”[8]
Some of Gladman’s work, like Space Question Vector (2021), visualizes the sentence as edifice, the paragraph as geography, and the book as a realm held together by make-believe mathematics that, like real math, makes her laugh. Her piece, Their Sleep (2023), takes the form of an annotated letter or paragraph in white ink and gouache on a black ground and starts with two lines that have been crossed out, as if the writer took three times to hone her opening and left evidence of her false starts on the page. Subsequent sections feature carefully rendered calligraphic forms reminiscent of cursive or Arabic script; yet when viewed up close, one realizes that the lines are made up of illegible, imagined, and potentially backward text. Gladman’s visual art practice builds upon themes of language and translation explored in her novels, in which she often invents other languages. Her artist books—Plans for Sentences, Prose Architectures., and One Long Black Sentence (featuring text by Fred Moten)—purposefully place her drawings in dialogue with text, though not as captions, titles, or descriptions. Like her writing, Gladman’s drawings invoke the uncanny and the absurd as she jests at the inability of either medium to communicate ideas and experiences completely, while troubling the authority and necessity of translation and description.
The black, white, and gray calligraphic marks that comprise Steffani Jemison’s Same Time series (2021) similarly suggest what the artist calls “tensions between what can be read, what can be intuited, and what refuses to give up its secrets.”[9] Mining Black vernacular traditions of encryption, Jemison looks to the archive for alternative genealogies of mark-making. For Same Time, the artist borrowed forms found in self-taught Black American artist James Hampton’s (1909–64) notebook, St James: The Book of the 7 Dispensation, which is filled with coded, indecipherable script that continues to confound cryptographers. Lifting individual marks from his writing, Jemison places them at the center of minimalist compositions of painted black and white brushstrokes on delicate, clear film, materializing the abstraction and opacity of these markings within a transparent container. This work extends Hampton’s legacy and enigmatic practice while continuing a Black American tradition of employing coded and private vocabularies.
In WLD (content aware), 2018—a collage composed of UV curable inkjet prints on glass augmented by acrylic paint, paper, and polyester film—Jemison references the life and writing of Ricky McCormick, a Black man found dead in a Missouri field in 1999 with encrypted notes in his pockets. Excavating Black vernacular writing as a reclamation of power, Jemison augments and alters McCormick’s untranslatable markings with an artificial intelligence program, lending special attention to the term “WLD,” which could signify “would,” “willed,” “wild,” or something else entirely. “I am interested in what happens when writing is decoupled from communication, or when it is deliberately encoded,” says Jemison, “Can it still be called writing if no one can read it?”[10]
In her line drawings, scans, and Xerox prints, Kameelah Janan Rasheed likewise renders words and sentences, numbers and equations, symbols and diagrams so that they appear coded or incomprehensible. As with the cryptic scribbling of Gladman or Jemison, Rasheed’s work often looks like haptic sketches or notes that purposefully remain difficult to decipher so as to depict “visual glossolalia” (the religious phenomenon of speaking in tongues while receiving wisdom from the divine), asemics (the unification of image and text, setting them free for separate interpretation), or automatic writing (also called psychography, or the proclaimed ability to produce written words without consciously writing). The artist has shared that she only recently accepted that she too is a writer, explaining: “There is no outside to text. Everything is text to me.”[11] Seeing no boundary between visual art and writing, she utilizes a variety of media to demonstrate how language shows up inside and outside of text, especially in bodily form. Like Gladman, Rasheed sees the sentence as a body, a building, an architectural plane. And like Moten, Rasheed explores notions of play and restraint to examine language as both refusal and enclosure, wondering at the ways a sentence might empty itself out—asking, “Is there a refuge in the sentence… an underground railroad?”[12]
Several of the artists in Scrawlspace engage with the aesthetics, functions, and implications of writing to dispute the domination of imperial idioms and reveal how language and texts have been wielded to survey and dehumanize Black people. Jamilah Sabur’s Mnemonic Alphabet series (2018–ongoing) interrogates how individual words and phrases reflect the origins and limitations of colonial languages. Each work features a letter and a word that starts with that letter, borrowed from different languages—including French, Portuguese, Spanish, and German—and rendered in neon. Sabur places the neon text against a blank, monochrome backdrop in tones that recall the colorful Caribbean settings of Kingston and Miami where Sabur grew up. Alongside this text and color appears a single original photo that responds to but does not necessarily illustrate the word. Though it immediately recalls children’s tools for learning alphabets and languages, the format is informed by Rhetorica Christiana (or Christian Rhetoric), a sixteenth-century Mexican tome created by Diego de Valadés, a Mestizo Franciscan Friar, in which images are coupled with text and function as conversion tools to impose upon Indigenous populations in New Spain. Focusing on individual terms, Sabur’s Mnemonic Alphabet series illuminates histories of power entangled in words.
Mnemonic Alphabet (P/Prédio), 2019 features the Portuguese word “prédio” (with an accent), which most readily translates to “a building,” while “prédio rural” references a plot of land. In Spanish, “predio” (with no accent) means “property,” signifying both an edifice and the land upon which the building sits, as well as the people who work/ed it. Additionally, “predio dominante / sirviente” refers to an organization of plantations, rhetorically evoking the ideology of people as property. The piece includes a photograph of a limestone quarry just west of Miami at the edge of the Everglades to tie linguistics to colonial concepts of property ownership and practices of excessive extraction, further connecting language and land, past and present, image and text.
While Sabur’s series looks to images and text, Sonya Clark locates meaning within text and objects. Working with coins, combs, beads, books, flags, thread, and hair, Clark works with and in response to racialized material histories. “Objects have personal and cultural meaning because they absorb our stories and reflect our humanity back to us. My stories, your stories, our stories are held in the object,” says the artist.[13] In SCHIAVO hair drawing, (Rome Drawing), 2017, on a folded sheet of paper opened like a book, she pierced the page to outline the word “SCHIAVO,” Italian for “slave” or “servant.” Through the letters C-I-A-O, she threaded loose strands of black hair to spell “CIAO,” Italian for hello and goodbye—a derivative of “schiavo.” Ciao thus means “I am your slave.” Clark points to the haunting and often invisible histories of slavery latent in our language and the bodies that bear the weight of this inheritance. How did this phrase evolve into something more congenial and what are the implications and consequences of this lingual ancestry?
Clark has also invented and uses the typeface Twist to subvert the near ubiquity of the Roman alphabet and call attention to the white supremacist machinations at its roots. Twist’s letters are designed from formations found in natural Black hair. In the work Twist Trace (2021), the artist arranges several swaths of fabric in a loose grid and uses a sgraffito batik technique to apply the text on the adjoining sheets of linen with wax and dye. Amid these translatable words and phrases, Clark sews in locks and balls of hair, evoking the Black body and its significations without representing the figure. The meandering line of thread references both the warp and weft of the textile and also the practice of Boustrophedon—an ancient Greek method of writing, roughly translated to “as the ox plows,” by which the text reads from right-to-left and left-to-right with letters in reverse on alternate lines so that the eye never need jump across the page. Through the strands of hair, Clark maps out the Big Dipper and North Star, key nocturnal guideposts for freedom seekers who braved the Underground Railroad, recalling how enslaved people, barred from learning to read and write in English, instead learned to read the stars and write codes with quilts and braids. Such mapping speaks to Rasheed and Moten’s search for an “underground railroad” within a sentence.
While Clark looks to alternative modes of communication through which to seek and express liberation, Sadie Barnette’sFBI Drawings series plays with redaction and annotation as practices of reclamation. The artist’s father, Rodney Barnette, served as an active member of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s and 70s while working for the U.S. Post Office. In 2011, the Barnettes requested any potential FBI materials on him via the Freedom of Information Act. After four years of waiting, the family received some 500 pages of redacted documents surveilling his movements and activities. File components detailed signatures from J. Edgar Hoover, interactions with Angela Davis and Ericka Huggins, as well as notes on the births and deaths of his siblings. These accounts are intimate yet surreptitious in their prescription of Mr. Barnette as a potential enemy of the state. Decades after the pages were originally drafted, Sadie Barnette enlarged various file pages from the FBI’s archive on her father, adding splashes of purple and pink, glitter, bows, and rhinestones. Through this annotation, she undermines the scrutiny and classification of her father’s life, reclaiming and rewriting the file as a loving portrait or family tree. In the work FBI Drawings: Very Truly Yours (New Years Eve 1968), 2021, she renders the page atop a chain-link fence pattern of repeating white ribbon. In her own intervention of refusal and redaction, she spray paints a single purple line through Hoover’s signature at the bottom of the page.
As with Moten and Mullen, many of the artists in Scrawlspace find their source material via the writings of other authors or modes of citation, visualizing the practice of call and response. Glenn Ligon, for example, duplicates and obscures quotations from authors such as Zora Neal Hurston, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison. Through numerous layers of reinscription, he augments the meaning of the sub/text while exploring what is left unwritten. Part of an ongoing series, his painting Study for Negro Sunshine #150 (2023) references a line from Three Lives: Stories of the Good Anna, Melanctha, and the Gentle Lena, a 1909 novella by modern American writer Gertrude Stein, in which she repeatedly employs racialized language and stereotypes to describe Black characters. Ligon was captivated by a phrase used in the story of the interracial protagonist, Melanctha, to describe her Black friend, Rose:
“Rose Johnson was a real black negress but she had been brought up quite like their own child by white folks.
Rose laughed when she was happy but she had not the wide, abandoned laughter that makes the warm broad glow of negro sunshine.”[14]
Fascinated by the words “negro sunshine,” in the work he rewrites the phrase again and again, in oil stick, coal dust, and gesso with increasing levels of opacity. Coal dust, applied over wet oil stick, adds texture and shine to the obscured words. Coal not only obscures, the substance also invokes fire, smoke, and energy, leaving us to wonder, is there sunshine in the coal? Is Ligon giving us renewed resources from the depths, a new pot of ink, for different ways of writing? Like Sabur’s visualization of a limestone mine in a colonized land, what dusty resources have already been taken?
Tony Cokes’ two-channel video, DFAI.01-05 (2023)—an acronym for the Dan Flavin Art Institute at whose Bridgehampton location the piece was first installed—cites a specific institution while “signaling the constellation of personas and sensibilities that have constituted it over time.”[15] The work remixes a cacophony of voices, both written and sung, collaging personally significant music and established texts into a brilliantly-colored audiovisual essay reminiscent of PowerPoint presentations or advertising media. In the video, quotations appear as unspecified sources, at times with just initials listed, or with page numbers pointing back to unnamed books. As a group, the vibrant slides provide commentary on art, cultural criticism, and print media, as well as didactic gallery writing and exhibition catalogues. A sampling of slides read: “Binney & Smith Company, the makers of the famous Crayola-brand crayons, changed the name of one of its colors from ‘flesh’ to ‘peach’”; “Together with the artists, things are quite different”; “There aren’t even museum labels”; “A means of transport or communication is replaced by another one and the earlier one disappears Pg. 94.”
These slides are accompanied by a soundtrack, a public playlist the artist created called “Trouble…”, through which Cokes investigates “the conceptual parameters, or implied futures of ‘gospel’ music.”[16] Featuring the enraptured cries of Mahalia Jackson, the delicate lullaby of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou’s fingers touching keys, as well as a variety of house beats that evoke the ecstatic nature of losing oneself on the dance floor, the audio augments each citation, placing them within a spiritual environment—heightened by tinted film added to gallery windows or blank colored projections that lend a vibrant, ethereal glow—prompting the viewer to question what we deem sacred. Would we call Cokes an editor? An essayist? A DJ? Mobilizing other people’s music and language, he intervenes and rewrites the archive, making a playlist of words.
In a similarly vivid palette, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo weaves words and phrases sourced from revolutionary movements into a web of text, colors, and patterns that cover media traditionally mobilized to communicate to and educate the masses. The artist’s murals, posters, banners, and sandwich boards serve as an extension of their own activism and speak to expansive communicative innovation and adaptation via poetry, fiction, and illegibility—lingual means of resistance and assertions of personhood. This is exemplified in collective survival in three parts (2022–ongoing), a body of work consisting of multicolored sandwich boards covered in text. Seeking to “speak the language of a collective survival,” one board features Black feminist poet, writer, and educator Lucille Clifton’s 1993 poem, “Won’t you celebrate with me,” a brief boast of individual defiance and un/worlding.[17] It begins:
won't you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
… [18]
Closing, “come celebrate / with me that everyday / something has tried to kill me / and has failed,” Clifton’s poem invites us to imagine spaces of respite and regeneration. Branfman-Verissimo’s mobile sandwich boards, blazoned with Clifton’s words in capital letters, extend this invitation into a diversity of tangible yet ephemeral spaces as the works move. Sections of the text are obscured by a pattern of diamonds and squares, as if Clifton’s liberatory poetics are pieces in a patchwork quilt. For Scrawlspace, Branfman-Verissimo paints a mural to augment this conversation featuring historical and contemporary Palestinian survival texts. Placed alongside Clifton’s writings, it recalls the Combahee River Collective’s declaration that while the “synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives,” Black feminism offers a potent banner under which we can “combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.”[19]
As detailed above, artists in the exhibition employ words and phrases to create work with varying levels of legibility. Gary Simmons engages with themes of erasure, palimpsest, memory, and possibilities of re-writing through a chalkboard-like aesthetic. Despite and in tandem with blurs, smears, and smudges, traces of the original text endure. Simmons’ mixed media work on canvas, Boogie Woogie Dream (2018), references the 1944 “talking picture” of the same name starring the entertainer and activist Lena Horne alongside jazz musicians Teddy Wilson and Albert Ammons. The painting aesthetically recalls the cinema screen or a blackboard, reading: “Boogie Woogie Dream, Teddy, Albert.” It highlights the too-often forgotten names of Black musicians, honoring both their contributions and the blues genre. By including these words, Simmons pulls this film and its stars from the archive, reinscribing their names and prompting encores of their performance. The work visualizes the ephemerality of marginalized individuals while demonstrating that (through collective memory) complete erasure is not possible. According to the artist, “The chalkboard is a surface for learning and unlearning, teaching and unteaching, and thus a great object to work with because it plays such a powerful role in the way our formative memories are constructed.”[20]
Through an aesthetic of repetition that refuses clear comprehension, Adam Pendleton employs his signature framework of Black Dada. In his body of work, Untitled (Not Not Are), the words “Not” and “Are” appear in stuttering multiples amid swaths of spray painted drips and deep black geometric shapes. The circles and ovals might be read as periods, exclamation points, or zeros following text that seems to fight with itself. Read as a discussion, the words reflect an argument, making a case in the negative (not) before affirming (are). The verb “are,” a form of “be,” perhaps suggests an ontological question or debate of personhood.
In 1968, Black sanitation workers went on strike in Memphis, Tennessee holding signs that read, “I AM A MAN.” Twenty years later, Glenn Ligon reinscribed these words in oil and enamel on canvas. These actions referenced the portable medallions fabricated by English abolitionist Josiah Wedgwood, which featured a supplicated, nearly nude male figure in Black basalt set against white ceramic with the words, “Am I not a man and a brother?” above his head. By asserting “I AM A MAN,” activists were speaking back to a system that refused to envision or define Black humanity. Pendleton’s work reinscribes these ongoing and echoing histories of self-assertion, joining the generational reiterations to insist: ARE!
Shinique Smith began her practice in adolescence with formal arts training, meditation circles, graffiti tagging, and written affirmations of “I AM” in ballpoint pen on denim. As an adult, she continues to explore the relationships between graffiti and calligraphy, text and textiles, and the ability of pattern and abstraction to relay messages, creating her own spiritual language through mantra-like repetition of mark making. Firedog (2006), a collage made up of ink, spray paint, and marker on paper, references the Chinese zodiac year of its making and a “firedog,” or andiron—a metal support used in pairs to hold logs in a fireplace. With this title, Smith alludes to a long history of book burning—the intentional and typically public incineration of written material that usually occurs in the context of religious or political oppression as a form of censorship, destruction of cultural heritage, or a silencing of certain authors or narratives. Alternatively, fire can be read as a force of power, regeneration, or guiding light, as with the coal in Ligon’s painting, neon lettering in Sabur’s work, and the stars invoked in Clark’s tapestry. Smith’s use of spray paint honors a long history of renegade writings in often neglected public spaces. Her work brings a criminalized form of expression into spaces of high art, contributing to a conversation on class, race, and ornament.
In Smith’s Juice on the Loose (2003), a bleach and ball point pen “painting” on denim, calligraphic white stains swirl across the canvas like a ghost map of the Mississippi, recalling long traditions of the fabric and dye, from indigo farming and processing in West Africa, to the denim uniforms worn by the sanitation workers who repeatedly declared “I AM A MAN.” During a studio visit, the artist shared, “There are a couple of things that humans have invented that are genius and forever. Writing is one and fabric is another.”[21] This relationship between text and textile connects her work to the practices of Clark, Branfman-Verissimo, and Jemison. Indeed, the words “text” and “textile” both come from the Latin word “texere,” meaning “to weave.” Like individual fibers, we stitch words into specific patterns to convey information and self-expression in an action that is often simultaneously intimate, public, and of the body.
The contemporary art market currently contains and promotes a profusion of Black figurative art. Does this body of work and its popularity assert the “I AM” of Black subjectivity and identity? Or does it further link the Black body to commodities of sale and exchange among a largely white, wealthy collectorship? Notions of representation and identity are also central for Black artists working in conceptual, abstracted aesthetics—as Evan Moffitt noted in his 2017 essay on the impact of Moten’s words, artists playing with text acknowledge that “identity is complicated by the language we use to define and express it.”[22] Scrawlspace spotlights artists subverting the primacy afforded to figural representation, prompting questions of personhood and self-expression beyond literal bodily form. Yet, these makers also demonstrate that self-assertion and mark making come from the body. Writing, reading, drawing, and painting are all actions of corporal consumption and production, connecting writers and artists with readers and audiences through the intimate appendages of eyes, ears, mouths, and hands. It is through the body that we make and remake writing.
Scrawlspace centers what Moten referred to as the “cramped and capacious” character of the “scene of writing” from which Black writers and visual artists have repeatedly sought, visualized, and realized freedoms.[23] We see words themselves as both cramped (beholden to the definitions, uses, and abuses of the imperfect writers who wield them) and capacious (in their elasticity, fungibility, and subjective deployment in innumerable and expressive ways). Saidiya Hartman reminds us that despite this expansive capacity, “The story exceeds the words.”[24] By illustrating the in/ability of language to truly encompass the excess that is Black life, artists broaden and invent new vocabularies, definitions, and grammars, while insisting that we must keep writing…
Endnotes
[1] Jemison, Steffani. “Drafts: Steffani Jemison on the Stroke, the Glyph, and the Mark” Artforum, April 2019. https://www.artforum.com/features/steffani-jemison-on-the-stroke-the-glyph-and-the-mark-242656/
[2] Morrison, Toni. Beloved. (New York: Plume/New American Library, 1987), 199.
[3] Moten, Fred. Black and Blur. (Duke University Press Books, December 8, 2017), 69.
[4] Mullen, Harryette. “Runaway Tongue: Resistant Orality in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Our Nig, Incident in the life of a slave girl, and Beloved,” in Samuels, Shirley, The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in 19th-Century. (Oxford University Press, December 17, 1992), 254.
[5] ibid., 250.
[6] ibid., 254.
[7] Rasheed, Kameelah Janan. “The Edge of Legibility.” Art21, October 20, 2021. https://art21.org/watch/new-york-close-up/kameelah-janan-rasheed-the-edge-of-legibility/
[8] Gladman, Renee. “On Drawing: Renee Gladman in Conversation with Kelly Montana.” The Menil Collection, September 22, 2022.https://youtu.be/9XrPk4A3CVw?si=MSu2TgKHx1O9hRFc
[9] Cited from text provided by Greene Naftali Gallery.
[10] ibid.
[11] Kameelah Janan Rasheed shared this on a zoom call with Scrawlspace curators on May 13, 2024.
[12] Rasheed shared this on a zoom call with Scrawlspace curators on June 13, 2024. This statement is about Fred Moten in his afterword to Gladman, Renee. Prose Architectures (Seattle: Wave Books, 2017), 112.
[13] National Museum of Women in the Arts website text: https://nmwa.org/art/artists/sonya-clark/
[14] Stein, Gertrude. Three Lives: Stories of the Good Anna, Melanctha, and the Gentle Lena. (Martino Fine Books, December 14, 2011). Originally published in 1909.
[15] Carter, Jordan and Markert, Emily. “Tony Cokes,” Dia Bridgehampton, June 23, 2023–May 27, 2024. https://www.diaart.org/exhibition/exhibitions-projects/tony-cokes-exhibition/
[16] Cokes, Tony. “About the Playlist.” Dia Art Foundation, March 2024. https://www.diaart.org/program/artist-playlists/tony-cokes-playlist
[17] Lukaza Branfman Verissimo, “artist’s statement,” 2024.
[18] Clifton, Lucille. “won't you celebrate with me” from Book of Light. (Copper Canyon Press, July 1, 1992).
[19] Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” in How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2017), 15.
[20] “Gary Simmons: Green Past Gold.” Simon Lee Gallery, September 12, 2018. https://www.simonleegallery.com/usr/documents/exhibitions/press_release_url/142/slg_gary-simmons_press-release.pdf.
[21] Shinique Smith shared this on a zoom call with Scrawlspace curators on May 6, 2024.
[22] Moffitt, Evan. “What Can't Be Read: How Bethany Collins, Steffani Jemison, Adam Pendleton and Kameelah Janan Rasheed are using the tradition of black radical poetry to examine questions of subjectivity and race,” FRIEZE, December 18, 2017.
[23] Moten, Fred. Black and Blur. (Duke University Press Books, December 8, 2017), 69.
[24] Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. (W. W. Norton & Company, February 19, 2019), 346.